Ryan Duffy Hunts for Real, Untold Stories

Ryan Duffy does his reporting on the frontlines. As an investigative journalist, his exploits range from documenting the brutal Drug War in the Philippines, to encountering gunfire outside of Bogota, to traveling to North Korea and shaking hands with the supreme leader. He’s befriended convicted murderers and Russian mobsters, raced Norwegian reindeer, chased down South African poachers, and witnessed a man make love to a poor, poor, Colombian donkey.

Shock value is fleeting; real stories that are underreported are what get us excited.

But adventure alone doesn’t make Duffy a role model. Duffy’s great contribution to the world is his incessant optimism in the face of the world’s biggest problems. When covering the Arab Spring, Duffy saw young people using technology to take their democracy, and their future, into their own hands. Inspired, Duffy started to focus on solutions-based reporting, truly finding his voice and calling. When so much of today’s twenty-four-hour news cycle relies on sound bites and shock value, Duffy is reporting in depth on real people that are combatting the world’s biggest issues with humanity’s most creative solutions.

“I honestly wanted to know what, if anything, could be done about a lot of this stuff,” says Duffy, “Deforestation in the Amazon, homelessness in Los Angeles, huge, underlying problems like race relations and poverty — and who the people were leading the charge.”

Duffy doesn’t claim to have all of the answers, but he’s using his voracious curiosity to find them. From forward-looking trends and new technologies, to better understanding the important moments in our history, this is a man on a quest to be informed, to share, and to discuss everything he finds. He does it all with a light and fun energy, even when facing the darkest of subjects.

Knowing Duffy and his work means becoming a better informed, more empathic human being. In a time where it is easy to be pessimistic, he gives us hope. And if his creative vision can inspire a generation of copycat problem solvers, instead of cynics, then he might just change a lot more than the voice of the news.